Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home

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For Ruby and Rosie

Introduction

The Reverse Underground Railroad

CORNELIUS SINCLAIR WAS ten years old and he was trapped. He was stuck in the belly of a small ship bobbing in the middle of the Delaware River, a mile south of Philadelphia. A man had grabbed him from a spot near that city’s market an hour ago, shoved a black gag across his mouth, tossed him into a wagon, and hauled him here.

It was dark below the waterline, but Cornelius could see enough to know that he was not alone. Four pairs of eyes stared back at him—four other black boys.

Yesterday they had all been free. Today they were slaves, prisoners of a gang of child snatchers who planned to sell their lives and labor, most likely to plantation owners in the Deep South. If the boys’ abductors got away with this, Cornelius would spend the rest of his life as someone else’s property somewhere very far away. He would never see his family again.

Cornelius disappeared from Philadelphia in late August 1825, about eleven months short of the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in that city in the summer of 1776. So much had changed since then. The new nation’s population had tripled, topping ten million, its land area had more than doubled, and the number of states in the union had jumped from thirteen to twenty-four, all of them now latticed together by ever-expanding networks of roads, canals, and steamboat routes.

Slavery in America was changing too. In 1776, there had been enslaved people in every rebel colony, but by 1825, slavery was dead or dying in the North. Fewer than twenty thousand black northerners remained in bondage, most of them in rural parts of New Jersey and New York where slavery was on its last legs. In the South, it was a different story. Slavery remained profitable and popular there, and more than 1.75 million black southerners lived as slaves. Assuming office in March 1825, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, presided over a union equally divided between free states and slave states, twelve of them apiece. The Mason-Dixon Line, which separated Pennsylvania—a free state—from Maryland and Virginia—two slave states—seemed to split the nation in two. It served, in the words of its recent biographer, as the closest thing to a modern international border anywhere in North America.¹

Situated just forty miles north of that border, Philadelphia was one of the nearest free cities to the slave South. That proximity made its many free black residents attractive targets for professional people snatchers from the slave states. They preyed on the members of the city’s black community relentlessly, putting bull’s-eyes on their backs and prices on their heads. Cornelius Sinclair was one of dozens of African American children to vanish from Philadelphia in 1825 alone. By then, the city was without question the hub of American slavery’s newest and blackest market. Its gridded streets and tangled alleys were hunting grounds for crews of professional kidnappers who made their livings turning free black folk like Cornelius into southern slaves. Philadelphia had long had a reputation as a safe haven for people of color, and was home to the headquarters of the American antislavery movement. But it was probably one of the most dangerous places to be a free black person anywhere in the United States.

The people these kidnappers stole could each fetch anywhere from $400 to $700 ($9,000 to $15,000 today) in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, three of the new territories and states rising up along the Gulf Coast. The American settlers swarming into that region demanded a bottomless supply of slave labor to cut sugarcane and pick cotton and would take almost anyone—including children as young as ten-year-old Cornelius. Buying some of their slaves from kidnappers may not have been their first choice. They had been forced to look to sources within the United States for their labor needs ever since 1808, when lawmakers in Washington had outlawed slave imports from Africa and the Caribbean—a major turning point in the history of slavery in America. Interstate slave traders worked hard to satisfy these settlers’ demand for black labor, bringing them thousands of American-born slaves each year from states like Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, but planters across the Deep South always wanted more.

The more settlers were willing to pay, the more tempting and profitable it became for unscrupulous entrepreneurs to kidnap free people from northern cities, smuggle them into the legal supply chain, and sell them in this vast new southern slave market. These incentives left Philadelphia’s large and dynamic black community dangerously exposed, and by 1825 the city had become the center of an interregional kidnapping operation, the northern terminus of what we might usefully call the Reverse Underground Railroad.

This Reverse Underground Railroad and its better-known namesake, the Underground Railroad, ran in opposite directions but were mirror images of each other. On the Underground Railroad, enslaved people abandoned southern plantations and trekked northward, dreaming of new lives and opportunities in freedom. On the Reverse Underground Railroad, free black people vanished from northern cities like Philadelphia and were made to trudge southward and westward to be sold into plantation slavery. On the Underground Railroad, conductors like Harriet Tubman risked their lives and liberty to help black fugitives make these epic journeys. On the Reverse Underground Railroad, the conductors were kidnappers and human traffickers motivated by money.²

The volume of traffic on the two railroads was roughly the same. Each one carried hundreds of black adults and children across state lines each year. Both networks roared to life in the early nineteenth century to exploit what by then had become major differences in the legal status of slavery in the North and the South. Both were loosely organized and opportunistic. Both ran on secrecy and relied on small circles of trusted participants, forged documents, false identities, and disguises. Whether traveling from the slave states into the free states or vice versa, black voyagers had to hide in stables, barns, cellars, and attics. The direction of travel was different, but the routes taken by freedom seekers and victims of kidnapping like Cornelius Sinclair were often the same. They might even have passed one another on the roads from time to time.³

Most Americans know something about the Underground Railroad. Scholars have spent decades studying the strategies and tactics that Harriet Tubman and her fellow conductors and station agents used to help freedom seekers escape from slavery. Accounts by former passengers and biographies of former participants have spurred immense interest not only in Tubman but also in her many comrades and collaborators. Their achievements saturate popular culture. There are walking tours, television shows, and museums dedicated to celebrating the men and women who, in the words of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, created the secret network through which the enslaved could escape to freedom.⁴

We know far less about the Reverse Underground Railroad. Its conductors and station agents worked tirelessly to remain untouchable, and the identities of all but a handful still remain a secret. Unlike Harriet Tubman, they never gave public lectures about their work or went on fund-raising tours. Only rarely do their names and crimes appear in surviving police files or trial transcripts, their low profiles the result of the years they spent in the shadows, protected by bribes, avarice, and indifference. Unlike legal interstate slave traders who sometimes bequeathed their papers to southern colleges and historical societies, the outlaws who built the Reverse Underground Railroad left no business records or bundles of private letters for historians to read and examine. They did not write memoirs or pose for paintings or photographs. Their homes and warehouses no longer stand.⁵

Yet these professional kidnappers left their mark everywhere. They stole away many thousands of free black people in the first six decades of the century, many of them children like Cornelius who were under the age of eighteen. Most of those kidnapped could not read or write and were never heard from again. Their families and friends searched, advertised, and petitioned. They waited in earnest for news, but usually nothing came. Beyond the meager ranks of a few Quaker-led antislavery societies, free black people in northern cities like Philadelphia had few white allies. White employers openly discriminated against African American job applicants, while city constables generally ignored people of color’s complaints and turned a blind eye to most white-on-black street violence. So when children like Cornelius went missing, their parents could rarely persuade mayors and magistrates to get involved. It was rarer still for anyone to be able to gather enough evidence to compel authorities to issue arrest warrants, search property, and interrogate suspects. Even then, experienced members of kidnapping crews knew what to do and what to say to talk their way out of trouble and get back to work.

Solomon Northup was one of only a few legally free people to experience the Reverse Underground Railroad, escape from southern slavery, and then return home to write about it. In Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Northup explains how, in 1841, a pair of well-dressed white con men lured him—a well-educated and prosperous musician in his midthirties—into New York City from his home upstate. In Manhattan they wined, dined, and drugged him, then sold him to an interstate slave trader in Washington, DC. Northup was forced onto a slave ship bound for New Orleans and sold in one of the city’s infamous slave marts to a planter who put him to work in his cane fields. Though the 2013 Oscar-winning film based on Northup’s extraordinary autobiography drew overdue attention to his ordeal, both the memoir and the movie offer distorted and perhaps misleading views of who the agents of the Reverse Underground Railroad were, whom they usually targeted, and how they made money.⁶

Northup’s experience was actually not at all typical. Most kidnappings were committed not by smartly dressed confidence men, but by poorer people who had never set foot in a fancy bar or restaurant. Most of the kidnappers active on the Reverse Underground Railroad were men, though some were women. Most were white, but a surprising number were black. They rarely approached highly literate, middle-aged men like Northup. They preferred instead to lure away poorly educated children with ruses that could swiftly separate them from their families. Very few of their captives traveled by ship to New Orleans. Instead, kidnappers forced most boys and girls to trek southward on foot in small, specialized overland convoys known as coffles, after the Arabic word for caravan. Their prisoners rarely ended up in showrooms or on the auction block, and were vastly more likely to be sold off in ones and twos to planters in the Mississippi and Alabama Cotton Belt who could not afford big city New Orleans prices.⁷

Unlike Northup’s experience, the full story of what happened to Cornelius Sinclair and the four other boys who went missing from Philadelphia in August 1825 has never before been told—and for understandable reasons. Cornelius was a child at the time and came from a hard-up family that was not the sort to leave behind traces in libraries and archives. This is a problem, of course, because historians need sources—and lots of them—to reconstruct past lives in ways that are fair and true. The stories and struggles of the many people who did not leave rich troves of papers, diaries, or memoirs often remain untold and unstudied as a result.

I have reconstructed the basic outline of this single episode in the long history of the Reverse Underground Railroad from a small packet of letters written to or from the mayor of Philadelphia and from coverage of later events in a single antislavery magazine, the African Observer. Historians have known about these modest sources for some time, but there is a lot more that is new here too. I’ve unearthed all sorts of treasures, buried within thirty-five archives in fourteen states and the District of Columbia. Among them: a plaintive missing-persons notice written by Cornelius’s grieving father; the handwritten notes of a trial that took place in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to decide the boy’s fate; and a pair of letters in which one of his kidnappers asserted his innocence. Together, this patchwork of new sources makes it possible at last to properly illuminate the experiences of these five young riders on the Reverse Underground Railroad. Still, the tale told here has holes, and I hope readers will notice those moments when I have taken the liberty to speculate because the paper trail has run dry.

Any story about free children ripped from their families and swallowed up by slavery is worth telling for its own sake, but the remarkable ordeal that Cornelius and his four fellow captives endured demands attention for many other reasons. It serves as a pointed reminder that child snatching was frequent, pernicious, and politically significant in the first half of the nineteenth century, and that black freedom in northern towns and cities was achingly fragile. It demonstrates too the important role that the traffic in kidnapped free people played in spreading slavery into the Deep South and in fueling the American economy over the same period.

Cornelius Sinclair’s parents rushed a missing-persons notice into the pages of the city’s most popular paper within three days of their son’s disappearance. Joseph Sinclair directed readers with tips to call at his place of work, a merchant house near the docks, where he was employed as a porter. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, August 13, 1825. (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.)

The dogged efforts of all those involved in trying to save these boys and others like them from the horrors of Southern slavery also had profound consequences. That campaign and its aftermath would radicalize black communities across the free states, emboldening African Americans to embrace violence in the cause of self-defense and mutual protection as never before. The case would reshape the rest of the antislavery movement as well by encouraging white abolitionists to focus the public’s attention on the suffering of black families forcibly separated by slavery. Most immediately, outrage over the abduction of these five boys forced lawmakers in Pennsylvania to pass tough new antikidnapping measures. Those laws enraged southern slaveholders and set in motion a chain of retaliations that culminated in the passage through Congress of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a bonanza for slaveholders that put the country on a collision course with civil war.

The events that unfold in these pages were the product of massive economic and political forces and would usher in a new chapter in the history of slavery and freedom in the United States. Yet this lasting legacy must not be allowed to obscure the urgent and elemental stakes of this particular story.

A ten-year-old boy and four other free children were dragged into slavery in 1825.

They would have to fight like hell to try to escape.

Chapter 1

Sanctuary City

SAM SCOMP WOKE early. He was a runaway from one of the last remaining slave plantations in New Jersey and had been bedding down in doorways all over Philadelphia for the last seven nights. The summer had been scorching, but a smart dash of rain overnight had finally, mercifully, cut the August heat. Hungry and stiff, Sam figured that an hour or two spent lugging barrels and boxes up from the docks would warm him up, dry his clothes, and earn him enough to buy a bun for breakfast.¹

Most of the city was still asleep. The only real activity was down by the Delaware River, where a scrum of men and boys crowded the wharves looking for a day’s work. Clustered around one or another of the dozen or so oceangoing vessels wedged side by side along Philadelphia’s clogged waterfront, they hustled and hollered to try to catch each first mate’s eye. Only when they got his nod could they board and begin heaving heavy crates from a ship’s slippery wooden decks down onto sturdy carts bound for the city’s central market.²

Just fifteen years old, Sam was young and strong. He was used to hard work, but had been in Philadelphia for only a week. He did not have his own wagon or wheelbarrow, and he barely knew anyone. Finding work, even on the docks, turned out to be harder than he had expected, and white men seemed to be catching most of the breaks. One by one, each crew chief sent Sam packing, preferring to deal with experienced cartmen who had their own wheels, or with other dock boys who had already proven themselves on hundreds of other mornings just like this one.

So it seemed like a blessing when a light-skinned black man strolled over to Sam and offered him work. The boy’s benefactor said his name was John Smith. He told Sam that he had a delivery of Peaches, Oranges, Water Melons &c that he needed to unload from a small sloop at anchor out by the Navy Yard and then haul back to a stall at the market. The job would take no more than two hours, and they could use a wagon already waiting for them down by the ship. Could Sam help him out? How did twenty-five cents sound?³

Dockwork was a major source of employment for unskilled laborers in Philadelphia in the 1820s. This image shows young black and white haulers jockeying for work near the Arch Street ferry several blocks north of Market Street in 1800. William Russell Birch, Arch Street Ferry, Philadelphia. Hand-colored engraving, 1800. (Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.)

Sam did not hesitate. As the two of them set off on the brisk mile-and-a-half walk to the Navy Yard, he might have begun to calculate what his morning wages could get him back in town. A quarter dollar could buy an armful of buns, and beer too, and who knew what else. Philadelphia’s market had it all, not just fruit sellers hawking melons, peaches, and oranges. If you knew where to look—if you poked around on the fringes of that grand outdoor bazaar on the high street—you could usually find food vendors hawking hominy and pepper pots, even roasted possum or squirrel, all of them selling for pennies.⁴

Sam was distracted and daydreaming, and his walk to the Navy Yard passed quickly. He was typically on his guard around strangers, especially white people, but he was hungry, and the prospect of easy money for light work had disarmed him. And besides, his new employer’s brown skin was only a little lighter than his own. John Smith was a decade older than his new assistant, yet slight and boyish looking. Sam could probably have bested him in a scrap, though a fight did not seem to be in the cards.

Smith was actually quite charming. If he had seemed a bit skittish when he’d first sidled up to Sam down by the docks, he had grown ever more at ease as they walked together down Front Street, leaving the city behind them. Anyone who came upon them that morning might have assumed they were longtime friends, or cousins, or half brothers out for some sort of dawn lark.

Not that anyone saw them. The riverbank was deserted as Sam and Smith hiked along, skirting scrublands and flower-filled meadows not yet swallowed by Philadelphia’s southward sprawl. They walked together for nearly half an hour, until finally several huge wooden sheds loomed ahead. This was the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Though small by European standards, this complex of dry docks housed several massive ships—all men-of-war—in various stages of construction and repair. As Sam and Smith approached, a rowboat scuttled out from a little cargo vessel bobbing in the middle of the yawning river and tied up to a small pier that jutted out into the water on one side of the yard.⁵

The man who now scrambled ashore to hail them was about twice Sam’s age, thirty or so, strong and sinewy. He and Smith obviously knew each other. He told Sam his name was Joseph Johnson, and he chatted idly with his two passengers as he rowed them out to the Little John to collect the fruit from the ship’s hold. Two minutes later, all three had clambered aboard, and Johnson introduced Sam to the Little John’s crew: Thomas Collins, a deckhand, and Bill Paragee, the captain. Paragee told Sam and Smith that he had set out refreshments for them belowdecks and beckoned them all to follow him and take a drink before setting to work.⁶

At the bottom of the stairs the four men’s friendly faces suddenly hardened to stone. Johnson shoved Sam to the floor and knotted the boy’s hands with rope. Sam began to howl for help, pausing only long enough to hear Johnson tell him that he was going to be shipped back to his master in Maryland. Sam roared at that lie—he was from New Jersey and had never once been to Maryland. You’re wrong, he told his captors, wrestling against the cords that now dug into his wrists. You’ve made a terrible mistake.⁷

Johnson was unmoved. He waited while the boy proceeded to shout himself hoarse. Then he moved closer, taking a large Spanish knife from his belt. For that brief moment Sam might have thought that Johnson was about to cut him free and release him. Instead, Johnson thrust the blade close to the child’s face and threatened to cut his throat if he resisted or made a noise.⁸

Sam swallowed the urge to scream, and watched, silently now, as his kidnappers went to work. Smith, the man who had baited Sam and brought him here, tied the boy’s feet. When he was done, Johnson told him to be off. Smith did as he was told, taking the rowboat back to shore and disappearing in the direction of the city. Johnson, Paragee, and Collins then hustled Sam into the depths of the ship’s hold, farther below the waterline. Using irons and locks, the men chained the boy’s legs to a pump there before returning to the deck and closing the hatch behind them. Sam was left in darkness.⁹

When the sound of the men’s footfalls receded, the whispers around him began. As Sam’s eyes slowly adjusted, he realized he was not alone. He could make out the shadows of two other boys, both shackled like him. He could tell from their voices that they were younger than he was, and he could hear them stifle their sobs as they told him who they were and what had happened. The older child was Enos Tilghman. He was ten years old. He seemed to be darker skinned than Sam, and said he worked as a sweep, cleaning chimneys in the city. The younger boy was lighter skinned and about eight years old. He had curly hair and said his name was Alex Manlove.¹⁰

Both of them had been stuck in this floating dungeon for many hours already. They could not be sure, but they guessed that a full day and night had passed since they had been lured to the Little John by the man who called himself John Smith. They were friends and had been playing together before falling for Smith’s promise to pay quarters for unloading fruit that didn’t exist.¹¹

The next few hours passed slowly. The boys’ talk started and stopped, punctuated by fear-stricken silences whenever they heard noises overhead. Then, quite suddenly, they heard scuffling above as someone roughly opened the hatch. In the half-light, Sam caught a glimpse of John Smith’s face as he and Joseph Johnson pushed another boy down the stairs and tied him up in a corner of the hold. An hour or two later, sometime in the early evening, the same thing happened again and another boy arrived.

One of the new arrivals looked to be only a bit younger than Sam, maybe fourteen or just recently turned fifteen. He was so upset he could barely speak. Haltingly, he told Sam, Enos, and Alex that his name was Joe Johnson—coincidentally, the same name as one of their captors—and that he too was a sweep. The other new inmate was much younger, though a bit more composed. He told Sam that his name was Cornelius Sinclair, that he was ten years old, and that he knew Alex from school.¹²

Cornelius had been sitting outside in the city center earlier that afternoon when Smith had sauntered up to him full of talk about money to be made hauling peaches. Cornelius’s parents, both former slaves, had warned him to be wary of strangers like Smith. So at first he had refused the unsolicited offer of work, but for some reason that he could not now explain, Cornelius let Smith keep talking and eventually agreed to follow him to a back alley. There Smith overpowered him, fixing a black sticking plaster across the boy’s mouth and dumping him into the back of a small covered wagon, which took off toward the distant silhouette of a ship floating in the middle of the river near the Navy Yard.¹³

Sam Scomp was the oldest of the five boys chained in the hold of the Little John. He was not on the run from a master in Maryland as Joseph Johnson had claimed, but it was true that he was a fugitive slave. He was actually on the run from a slaveowner in New Jersey. On the day John Smith kidnapped him, August 10, 1825, Sam had been, by his own account, but a few days in Philadelphia, having fled across the Delaware River from his New Jersey master just a week earlier. New Jersey was still a slave state in 1825, home to the largest population of enslaved people anywhere north of Delaware. While slavery was nearly extinct in every other state north of the Mason-Dixon Line, New Jersey’s five thousand or so enslaved workers remained a vital part of its agricultural economy.¹⁴

Sam was born in Readington Township in late 1810 or early 1811, one of the 25 percent of black New Jerseyans who still worked as bound laborers. The name Scomp was Dutch and quite common in the state at the time, and Sam’s father and mother, Samuel and Rose, had likely worked for someone of that name at some point. By the time Sam was born, they were owned by John Kline, who was of German extraction. Kline was the owner of a prosperous tanners’ yard and a one-hundred-acre homestead in Hunterdon County, a farming community tucked away in the northwest corner of the state. A lifelong member of Readington’s Lutheran congregation, he was known by many as a modest and charitable man of simple, child-like faith… who exerted a widespread influence for good.¹⁵

Sam’s first master was John Kline, a German American tannery owner from Readington, New Jersey. Kline was forty, married, and childless in 1824, the year he sold Sam to David Hill, a resident of nearby Amwell. James P. Snell, comp., History of Hunterdon and Somerset Counties, New Jersey, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Philadelphia, 1881). (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.)

Like many pillars of this rural community, Kline owned at least half a dozen slaves. Several, including Sam, were technically his apprentices. In America, children born to enslaved women were typically condemned to a lifetime in bondage, but the Gradual Abolition Act passed by New Jersey state legislators in 1804 had moderated this matrilineal curse. Rather than serve as slaves for life, children born to enslaved mothers after 1804 were designated as slaves for a term, bound laborers whose legal status was more akin to that of indentured servants. Sam was one of these term slaves, required by law to labor for Kline until his twenty-fifth birthday. The same was true for Sam’s younger brothers, Frank and Peter.¹⁶

In practice, events cut short Sam’s quarter-century-long apprenticeship. In the fall of 1824, Kline decided to trade the remaining years of Sam’s term of labor to a neighbor named David Hill in exchange for a black woman named Ebey and a two year old bull. That winter, Kline sent the boy to live on Hill’s grain farm in Amwell Township, ten miles from Readington. It was close enough that Sam might still visit his parents and brothers from time to time, but far enough away for the separation to be painful, if not deeply wounding. At the time, Sam still had a decade of his indenture left to serve, and so had little choice except to do as he was told.¹⁷

Sam now belonged to David Hill,